"Why weren't you at my choir concert/prize-giving/form assembly?" Deborah now asks me every day at home time, while I scuff my shoes along the ground and look guilty.
It's the time of year when so much is going on at the children's schools that, with minimal effort, I have only to blink to turn myself into the sort of unreliable mother who elicits much tutting in the staffroom.
"It's my brain," I say. "I think it's stopped working. If you put your ear to the side of my head all you can hear is the 'snap, crackle, pop' of synapses giving way. I'm thinking of calling in the builders and having the whole lot demolished as an unsafe structure."
There's a pause.
"Anyway, I did come to sports day," I venture.
"Huh! Only because I reminded you," says Deborah, grimly, "And you refused to do the mother's race."
"God - that mother's race," says Vicky, who has caught us up. "Dontcha hate it? And talk about pressure to do it. I only just padlocked myself to the car steering wheel in time, and even then I had to fight off that class rep with the blowtorch."
"It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't have that new teacher pirouetting round the place like a jack in the box on steroids."
"Miss Carter," says Deborah, a look of hero worship lighting up her eyes. "She's very young."
"Young?" says Vicky. "She's about 12. If that."
Miss Carter is the newest teacher at Deborah's school, apparently recruited in an effort to boost levels of suicide and anorexia amongst the mothers. She is so petite that if she curled up on a sofa, you could easily mistake her for a smallish yet perfectly formed scatter cushion and squash her. Not that she'd stay still long enough to give you the chance because in addition to her looks, she also has a pre-teaching career behind her as a top level gymnast.
"I don't think she broke sweat when she won the teacher's race - or anything else, come to that," says Vicky.
"And when she won, she turned that cartwheel," says Deborah, dreamily.
"Cartwheels, schmartwheels," says Vicky. "But can she burp the alphabet? Now there's a true test of sporting ability, not to mention literacy."
We look at Deborah, triumphantly.
"You're pathetic," she says, and marches off ahead.
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6 comments:
i shamed myself in the mother's race this week - but i do have the excuse that i was about a hundred years older than most of the others.
There is no shame in failing to win a mother's race unless you were so drunk you fell unconscious at the finishing line, and not necessarily then.
Have you done that then OM?
You're back! Even I have been blogging more than you... Great that you are anyway.
I just hadn't (haven't still, really) got time - but couldn't quite bring myself to stop. It's all that lies between me and sanity. Will come over and visit, I promise. Thanks for your nice comment.
Oh it is so good to have you back!
I have managed to feign some form of injury for the last 4 years. It seems this twisted and broken ankle is still too tender to do the mum's race.
Oh how I have missed you! No-one else around to take the Mickey out of life (and self) the way you do.
On this one though - and reluctantly, because I too used to run a mile just to escape running in the mothers' race - on this one I have to say I'm with Deborah. You should have been more subtle, or at any rate more circumspect, when you sounded-off against her favourite teacher!
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